ISE6: Forest Canopy Shawl finished

Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once more... I absolutely adore this pattern and can't recommend it enough as a great beginners lace shawl project. It would also make a quick knit for more experienced lace knitters.

To my surprise, my non-attention span coped with the pattern repeat. I took my time and completed the shawl in two weeks. I imagine the next one will fly off the needles (she says hopefully!).

FCS grows pretty quickly and I can't wait to start another one using DK weight yarn and bigger needles.

Blocking this shawl was fun, if a little bit of a challenge. I've never blocked a triangle shawl before and I got there in the end thanks to Yarnharlot, Eunnyjang and Morehouse Merino.

I do hope my ISE pal will like it.

• Pattern: Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawl by Susan Pierce Lawrence
  Needles: 4.5mm circular needles, knit loosely
  Yarn: 100g of GeminiKnits sockyarn in 'Pacific', 75g used
  Pattern repeats: Twelve
  Blocked size: 51" x 21"

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With Wool Winder I Wound Wool!!!

It's the little things in life that make me happy. Grape Hyacinths in Spring; Little Miss CB's sleeping face; yarncakes. YARNCAKES??? Yup. Yarncakes! I love yarncakes. They're just so darn pretty!

Anyway, I got off to a shaky start due to a slight technical hitch with the winder. See the photo? The grey and white cogs aren't meshing at all and they should be. I bent the metal bar with my pliers so that the grey cog tipped forward to touch the white one and this fixed the problem.....

.....and as you can see from the pretty yarncake, it's working fine now. Sigh! Isn't she lovely. :)

So big thanks to some extremely helpful online friends with the same model. They took the time to take photos and post them online so that I could compare their model to mine. Thanks ladies!

Time to wind me some wool. I think Katie and I shall be fighting over who gets to crank the handle! ;)

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ISE6 - Yarn Purchased

The yarn I ordered before Easter arrived yesterday, all beautifully wrapped and packed. Two yarn cakes of 4ply merino sock yarn from Sarah (Gemini Knits) in various shades of blue, blue and blue!

Sarah is lovely and extremely helpful, even winding the skeins into lovely center pull balls for me (I really don't enjoy winding skeins of 4ply yarn by hand off the back of a chair!)


Blue seems to be the dominant colour on the ISE6 blog so far and I'm amazed at the progress some people have already made!


Now, as per usual, I will be 'umming' and 'awing' for the next few days trying to decide which colourway to use for my pal's scarf. Time to knit me some swatches!

TTFN

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Spindle spun fun!!

It's been a fun couple of weeks. I've been challenging myself to see how thin I can spin the yarn without breaking it. So far, the best I've made is a 25g skein which measures 80m. I haven't worked out the wpi yet but that's coming.

The Babe spindle can't cope with much more than about 6g of spun wool when it's spun so thin. I haven't tried spinning such thin wool on the wooden spindle yet and that'll be a project for another day.


For this skein I took the 4 blue singles (one pictured above) and plied each one back on itself. I then spit spliced each plied ball of wool to the other and then wound them into a skein on my arm.


Now all I need to do to finish off this skein is to give it a quick rinse to set the twist. I feel like I'm making REAL wool now. But it's hard work producing this much on the spindle as I'm using muscles I never knew I had.

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